My porch light stays on, anyway, so I tweaked the annual suggestion from a child-safety advocacy group that bears his name and lit a candle instead Tuesday night to remember Jacob Wetterling.

Jacob, then 11, was abducted at gunpoint Oct. 22, 1989, by a masked gunman as he, a younger brother and a neighborhood friend rode bikes near their homes in St. Joseph, Minn. Despite thousands of tips and global news coverage, the case remains unsolved.

Most Minnesotans remember or know some details about the case. But the passage of time — 24 years now — has a way of making such a case fade from public memory.

Not for Patty or Jerry Wetterling, the missing boy’s parents. Not for his three siblings, now in their 30s. Not for family and friends. They live it each day in some manner.

But the hope that one day he will be found never goes away. That hope — irrational or reasonable, depending on the case — is reinforced by incidents like the mysterious cases unfolding in Greece and Ireland in recent days.

A little blond girl dubbed “Maria” was found last week living with a couple in a Roma camp near the Greek town of Farsala following a police drug and weapons raid. The kid looked nothing like the couple, and a DNA test confirmed she was not theirs. The couple told police they were given the child by a Bulgarian woman who was unable to look after her, two weeks after she was born on Jan. 31, 2009

Cops doubt their story. The girl was removed from the home while officials seek to identify her and find her biological parents.

“I have never seen a case where we are looking for the parents instead of the child,” Delphine Moralis, deputy secretary general of Missing Children Europe, told reporters. “We have never issued a found poster; it has always been a missing poster.”

Coincidentally, police in Ireland on Monday removed a 7-year old blond, blue-eyed girl from a Roma couple in Dublin. The couple gave police a birth certificate from Coombe Hospital in Dublin, which has no record of the birth.

KEEPING HOPE ALIVE

News of the cases has prompted parents of other missing children across the globe, including the U.S., to have lead case investigators inquire whether “Maria” — who police believe might be 5 or 6 years old — might be their child.

They include the British parents of Madeleine McCann, who was 3 in 2007 when she vanished without a trace during a family holiday in Portugal. And the parents of Lisa Irwin, a then-10-month-old girl who disappeared from her Kansas City home two years ago, asked the FBI to make inquiries into the case in Greece.

There are plenty of other cases in recent years to keep hope alive. They range from the recovery of Elizabeth Smart in Utah several years ago to this year’s rescue, from a house of horrors in Cleveland, of three young women who had been abducted years ago.

Wetterling has told me time and again over the years that these “found” cases juice up her hopes that Jacob, who would be 35 now, will one day find his way back and ring the doorbell to the family home. That’s why the Wetterlings keep their porch light on throughout the years.

That’s why, when the area code to their home phone number changed after Jacob’s disappearance from 612 to 320, a volunteer called every known area code in the U.S. with the same seven-digit number to inform them about Jacob in case he ever called them.

“That was amazing,” Wetterling said Tuesday during the annual family reunion at her home. Wetterling channeled her grief to become an outspoken child protection advocate. She currently serves as the chair to the board of directors of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She is also program director of the Minnesota department of health’s sexual violence prevention program.

Another person who never loses hope is Stearns County Sheriff John Sanner. He still has a detective actively assigned to the Jacob Wetterling case.

“The case remains open because a family and a community await answers they deserve,” he said in an email Tuesday. “If we label the case ‘cold’ and file it away, the tendency is to forget about it. That cannot happen.

“Keeping the case assigned to a detective automatically gives the investigation both a sense of ownership and responsibility. In other words, life,” he added. “I have never promised to solve the case; I have, however, promised to never stop trying to solve the case. That fire burns as passionately today as it did when it was kindled in 1989!”

And so, even if it is merely a gesture, turn on a light this week for Jacob and, by extension, all missing and exploited children out there.

Anyone with information on the Jacob Wetterling case is asked to call the Stearns County sheriff at 320-251-4240. For information on Wetterling or any other missing child, call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-THE-LOST.

From smoking crack in a Harlem drug den for a front-page exposé to covering the deaths of 86 people in a Bronx social club fire, Rubén Rosario spent 11 years as a writer for the New York Daily News before joining the Pioneer Press in 1991 as special correspondent and city editor. He launched his award-winning column in 1997. He is by far the loudest writer in the newsroom over the phone.

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